


Fading

by moth2fic



Category: Torchwood
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-14
Updated: 2010-12-14
Packaged: 2017-10-13 16:17:30
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,035
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/139234
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moth2fic/pseuds/moth2fic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An exploration of a relationship that grew during the lost year.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fading

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MistressKat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MistressKat/gifts).



> Written for Kat, who wanted something happy about Tosh and Owen. That was difficult, given canon, but I hope the implied hope and the temporary joy outweigh the angst.
> 
> Many thanks to Marg for a fast and efficient beta that put me right on canon and strengthened the ending.

_...like to a flowre that feeles no heate of sunne. Edmund Spenser_

The shock of Jack’s going threw them every which way; then they sprang back and cohered as a team, perhaps stronger and more grouped than before. Without their leader they needed to be strong, to focus, to do for themselves what he had always done for them. And they looked at each other in new ways.

Ianto, of course, was grieving, and they all respected his grief, left him mostly alone with his stoicism and his coffee blends. Gwen had Rhys. Rhys to go home to, Rhys to leave in the morning, Rhys to comfort even when he didn’t know what had caused her distress. Tosh and Owen on the other hand...

At first, Tosh felt a strange kind of liberation. She was still imprisoned by duty and her own skills but the gaoler was gone. She could walk away if she wished. Walk into the hillsides or along the shore; even through the Rift. She didn’t wish it; how could she? But the feeling was there and she welcomed it until she grew to realise that her prison was the world, not the Hub, not Torchwood, not even Cardiff. Then she missed the captain who had given them structure, found reasons for being and doing.

More and more, she found herself working with Owen. Together they researched biochemical nuances and alien genetics on a system she understood and loved. She created a mini-encyclopaedia for their findings, with references that crossed faster than light and links that led down mysterious alleys in cyberspace. They called it their micropaedia and grinned at each other. Suddenly the medic, who had been so insufferably conceited and righteous, who had looked down his nose at the techie, was turning into a colleague after all.

She knew he was flawed, like her. He was no glamorous leader, no ever-efficient assistant, no do-gooder with a police badge. He was, however, human, and she liked that. She liked having someone to exchange glances with over coffee, to bicker with over takeaway meals, to call for when one of her cyber-queries came good.

“Owen! You know that weevil DNA that we ran through...” and he was at her side, scanning the results with quick enthusiasm.

“You did well there, Tosh. How did you get from A to B?”

“I threw everything at it and something must have stuck.”

“Well done, anyway!” and she glowed in the praise. Everything they could find out might be useful eventually. When they weren’t hunting in and around the Bay they were hunting online, sometimes in the outer threads of the web.

He started walking her home.

“I’m going your way. Want some company?” She wanted and welcomed it. She had always been such a private person, companionless by choice as well as necessity. Her usual company was aliens or ghosts. This was a living breathing human by her side, chatting as they walked, of funny, inconsequential things, the wording of an advert on a hoarding, the destination of a passing bus, the weather.

One night it was raining, and instead of taking a bus they walked through the splattering drops, close under an outsize umbrella Owen had produced from nowhere. She remembered that he’d been engaged, had somewhere, somewhen, known how to be gallant and practical; how to get home dry.

“Come in , Owen. Let me make you a hot drink before you go further. I’m no coffee expert but I can offer tea or cocoa.” There. That wasn’t too forward, too needy? Too gauche? She thought he hesitated but he was just shaking the umbrella, then standing it in a corner near the door, half open and ready to take him onwards.

They sat shyly and stiffly, on opposite chairs, a low table between them holding the drinks. He had chosen cocoa and the chocolatey steam drifted into her heart. He made formal noises of admiration for her flat, with its minimalist furnishings and clean lines. She only half heard him. She was thinking that she had perhaps found a friend.

At Christmas they all went for a drink, and she gathered all her courage, kissing Owen under the pub’s mistletoe then laughing it off as a joke. He laughed too, but she thought Gwen eyed her strangely. At New Year they sang Auld Lang Syne, stumbling over the Scottish phrase and swearing eternal remembrance.

“Unless one of us takes retcon by mistake,” said Owen. “Then where would our auld lang synes be?” The others had no answers. Tosh knew she would never, never, do anything so stupid. And she would never, never, do anything that would cause anyone to administer it to her against her will. She would remember.

“Happy New Year!” they all said, and everyone kissed everyone in turn. This time there was no need to laugh anything off. Just friends, seeing in the new year with a kiss. The start of something, she thought.

Spring came early and they went for walks, talking animatedly about their latest researches. At first they were timid, sticking to the centre, rounding the lake, admiring the castle and the Norwegian church, posing for photographs by the sculptures, the stone boat, the bench with the sleeping person as a pedestal, the peacock - or was it a dragon - that decorated Cardiff’s reinvention. Then they caught a bus, almost daring, like children truanting from school, and explored the coastal walks, skirting the mudflats and rambling for miles till they could see the sea and the bay as if on a panorama postcard.

“I’ve never really looked at it,” she said. “It’s always just been the place where the Rift is, the place we need to protect.”

Owen nodded. “The place of the weevils,” he said, and she knew he understood. “Now,” he added, “it’s the place I’ve explored with Tosh,” and he glanced sideways as if expecting some demurral or objection. She just smiled.

The next weekend they went to the Brecon Beacons, as tourists, not as Torchwood. The bare hills were beautiful with new grass, cool and windswept. Tosh ran down a slope, breathless with happiness more than with running, and Owen followed her, laughing at her pleasure.

Once they had broken Cardiff’s invisible barrier they grew braver. They explored the Gower Peninsula, listening to the calls of the lambs, stopping to pick wild iris, thrift and Welsh poppies until they had too many flowers to take home and had to scatter some on the sea.

“An offering,” said Tosh. “A sacrifice to the gods of the sea.”

“Does that mean they’ll let us leave in peace?”

“Perhaps. We’ve given them bouquets for their mermaids.”

“And I have a bouquet for you.” He spoke softly but seriously and handed her the flowers he had fastened together in a posy, winding a piece of sheep’s wool around the stems. She licked her lips, hopeful but uncertain. They held hands on the way back to Swansea and then were swirled onto the train, caught in commuter chaos, no longer separate from the rest of humanity.

They borrowed the 4x4 and went to Caerleon. The Roman fortress fascinated Owen, who saw himself as a legionary, far from home. Tosh was more interested in the links with King Arthur and the belief that this could be the site of Camelot.

“I wonder if the Rift near Cardiff produced the monsters for the knights to fight?” She was gazing at the circular ruins and Owen was examining the detail on some stone so she had to repeat her query.

“The Round Table as a kind of early mediaeval Torchwood?” he said, smiling. “I wonder if Jack was there. Maybe...” They speculated about the possibilities, about whether Jack would have been Merlin, wise and magical, or Arthur, strong but all too human. “Lancelot?” said Owen and they shook their heads together.

“Gwen’s name is a form of Guinevere, you know,” said Tosh, and they instantly cast Rhys as Arthur, Jack as Merlin, Ianto as a doomed Lancelot and Owen himself as either devoted Sir Kay or wicked Mordred.

“That leaves you unaccounted for,” he said, and they decided Tosh was Nimue or Nyneve as some people wrote the name, skilled in magic and responsible for spells, Excalibur and Merlin’s long disappearance from court.

“Spells, yes,” she said, thinking of the computer, “but I bear no guilt for Jack’s absence!”

They wandered around the site for a while, expanding their fantasy, then sat on the grass, thinking themselves back to the times of the possible Arthur or further to the more definite Romans. Owen picked a buttercup and handed it to her, twirling the tiny stem so that the flower was spinning like a deftly flicked coin.

“Here’s Arthurian gold for you,” he said, courteously, and she thought the deep buttery yellowness would enshrine her memories of the day for ever. They kissed, this time without necessity. There was no mistletoe, no singing of Auld lang syne, just a group of school children who whistled and ran away laughing.

Caerleon was almost England, lying in a county disputed from earliest times. That was the furthest they strayed. Somehow, they needed to stay in Wales. Her flat, in Cardiff, sheltered them, the Bay enclosed them, the Hub grounded them and Torchwood protected them.

And then they were sent, all of them, on a wild goose chase in mountains that might as well have been on the far side of the moon. Shaken, stirred, shocked, they listened to broadcasts, those that were still on air. Gwen fretted for Rhys. Ianto still grieved for Jack and now for all mankind. Owen decided he was Sir Kay rather than Mordred and would protect his lady with his life despite having no sword and no visible enemy to fight. Tosh felt fatalistic about it all. Her brief happiness had never seemed quite real although it had been so intense she had sometimes forgotten to breathe. There were no spells to cast, no magic that would rescue the world.

When Jack reappeared in Cardiff and tried not to tell them of the year that never was they failed to listen between the lines but Tosh knew something was missing. She found herself looking at Owen, assessing him in different ways, wondering if they had been friends in some kind of alternative life; wondering if they had ever been ret-conned, for their own good, of course, and if so... Sometimes he would look back at her, head on one side, considering. Jack and the Rift kept them all too busy to worry about might-have-beens, once or future. They skirted around each other, occasionally flirting. She remembered Gwen, Suzie, Diane, and Katie. She wasn’t even sure she wanted to compete.

Owen’s death and resurrection tore Tosh’s soul in two. She tried to rationalise her emotions; feelings for a colleague, fears for herself and the others, instinctive horror at the unnaturalness of it all. But underneath all that ran a lament for herself and Owen. Where had that come from? Why did her brain link them that way? She started thinking about him even more often and noticing his good points, his defensiveness that came across as hostility, his intelligence. She started to share computer discoveries with him, an intense sensation of déja vu accompanying her efforts. There was little else to share; a dead man needed no coffee or takeaways, but why did she automatically look at him when such things were mentioned? And why did an umbrella make her feel nostalgic?

When they were facing his second death and her first (and final) one, the memories came rushing back. There was a forgotten year, filled with the beauty of the flowers they had picked and she remembered, too late, research that might have helped Gray. She had loved and lost, but that was far, far better than never having loved at all; her last thoughts were tinged with the gold of buttercups and her hopes lay with the mermaids. Perhaps they would bear her to the fabled Isle of Avalon and there, if the gods of the sea were kind, she would be reunited with her 'verray parfit gentil knyght'.


End file.
